Beginning of the Ursysovan Hivecrushers
by Doctor-Fluffywolf
Summary: The Ursysovan Hivecrushers would be easily ignored, if one did not consider their history. Previously, they were an underfunded Catachan unconventional tactics unit, until they were deployed to Ursysova... Oh, and there is DELICIOUS commissar ham in ch.1


...

(Note: I know bolts are very expensive. How did Nikolaievitch get so many? Well, he stole them. They were on a Forge World, after all, and there is no rule saying you can't scavenge the equipment of hivers or AdMech in an emergency. Of course, the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer probably would say something like that, but no-one listens to the primer. Know who does? Dead people.)

"Come on, you bastards!" yelled Haru "Voicebreaker" Nikolaievitch, Commissar to the Catachan Firestomers, sweat running down his white skull facepaint. There was a _clink-clank_ as the cylinder of his 28-gauge blued Elysian Revolving Firefly Coilbolter/Shotgun Pistol twisted another round into position, and a _KCHAK-FRAAAAAWW _noise as the bolt flew out at a disturbing speed, hitting one of the servitors in the throat and sending his flaming head flying up into an overpass to land on another servitor and light him on fire, while the bolt hit someone else, and blew them into flaming bloody chunks. "EXPURGATION, YOU SONS OF TAU! EXPURGATION!"

"What exactly does that mean?" asked Eizak Grimnebulin, Regimental Tech-priest hailing from Krieg, welding the laspistol onto the autocannon with an elecrically-powered Arc Welder.

"Sounded like something an Inquisitor would say!" Nikolaievitch yelled back. "HOW MUCH MORE TIME DO YOU NEED TO FINISH THAT THING?"

"Just give me a couple more minutes and more laspistol!" Grimnebulin replied as the welder crackled, sparks of electricity fusing the rivets to the band of metal he'd welded on to the rotating autocannon(1).

Around them were the reports of primitive to not-so-primitive shotguns, lasguns, stubbers, crude coilstubbers, and industrial tools rigged to fire at long medium range, as the inhabitants of Ursysova fought for their very humanity. The Ursysovans hadn't the training or skill of seasoned Guardsmen, or the speed and frontier ingenuity of a Commissar raised on a postapocalyptic Feral World, but they had the innovation of hivers who'd taken enough shit for twenty lifetimes, and the sheer determination found in men and women who knew it was this or a fate worse than death.

He took aim with his second Coilbolter, little more than a Firefly with the integrated Melta system replaced with an arc welder, aimed for the throat of a servitor, where he was sure the wires linking up to the brain would be easiest to hit, and fired the full-lightning burst.

Direct hit!

The rush of electricity overloaded the servitor's programming, both biological and technological, and half of its brain exploded. Somehow, that felt more satisfying to use, and he alternated between firing the two coilbolters, watching as they died in fire and lightning, and sometimes both at once.

He had an empty promethium drum strapped to his back, where he was able to keep enough bolts, slugs, and shotgun rounds for the pistols and his meltashotgun, and supplies were starting to run low. They had to turn the tide fast. "I! WANT! THAT! FOKKIN! GUN! UP! AND! RUNNING! FIVE MINUTES AGO, BY THE EMPEROR!" he yelled to Grimnebulin, as an Ursysovan nearby liquefied a servitor's head with a modified laspistol, exploding its cogitator and blowing molten metal through its eyes.

There was a clanking sound from above, and-

FOOM

Nikolaievitch barely had time to register the stealth-servitor above his head, jumping at him, before an Ursysovan, using a gun made from a repulsion piston, a modernized scrapper cannon requiring no explosives unless the user wanted them, utterly eviscerated it with a length of chain shoved down the repulsion gun's barrel.

"THANK YOU!" Nikolaievitch yelled.

"I thought Commissars were sociopathic bastards who wouldn't help anyone but the Imperium at large!" the man with the scrapper cannon observed, firing a can of volatile compounds at the servitors.

"We are!" Nikolaievitch replied, underscoring this by shooting a formerly male servitor in the crotch with a flaming bolt from the Firefly. "But I'M!" He shot three servitors through the throat with an electric bolt from the other coilbolter, which he really had to name! "Human!" Another servitor with a giant drill in its gut, courtesy of Sergeant Rikhard Huston's drill launcher, exploded into half-melted and high explosive shrapnel and molten metal. An Ursysovan shot it with his lasrifle, and it exploded, taking out even more servitors. "Just! Like! You! Besides, why wouldn't I thank someone who saved my life?"

"Is that all of them?" Huston asked.

"Oh DAMMIT!" Nikolaievitch yelled, pointing to more servitors coming around the corner. He fumbled with the grips at the front of both coilbolters, which seemed to have been taken from the pump of a shotgun, which was quite apropos as he was busy reloading the massive pistols with a mixture of bolts and shotgun rounds, and yelled "FUUUULLLL POWEEEER! PREPARE YOUR ASSES FOR VICIOUS ENTRY, YOU SONS OF BITCHES!"

There was another enormous bang as lightning and fire exploded out of the barrels of both pistols, incinerating and overloading the lead servitors. "KEEP AT THEM! NO QUARTER!" There were only about four magazines left for the pistols-twelve rounds for each. Yeah, this was definitely a time for his shotgun.

"Is that gun ready?" yelled one of the Ursysovans, for the umpteenth time.

"One more laspistol to be welded in, then we have to unite the ignition housing, connect the power nodes, and-" an Ursyovan laspistol worked started.

"No technobabble! Just get it running!"

Nikolaievitch unlimbered the shotgun, turned on its melta function, selecting two mags at random, loading them in, and emptying them into the servitors. The left magazine, conspicuously full of hellfire bolts, hit the flaming servitors, making their organic parts grow and absurd and disturbing rates before dissolving into flaming green goop, and the right was full of actual shotgun rounds, sending something like a burst of fire from a flamer, except it didn't eventually hit the ground. "SUCK! MAH! GUUUUUNNNNNNN!"

The final laspistol had been screwed onto the autocannon. "Come on, come on!" Grimnebulin muttered, taking several salvaged power cables, ramming them into the laspistol power nodes, and engaging the generator. "Ammo belts!" he yelled. "Something, anything in the neighborhood of .50cal!"

The Ursysovans looked at him, and scrambled over, grabbing all the .50 stubs they could, and passing them to Grimnebulin. He grabbed a spent ammmo belt, and jammed them all in, loading the belt into the autocannon, and activated the promethium flow when...

_cough_

Frak!

The tubes were clogged!

Grimmnebulin frantically banged the tubes with his wrench, checked the belt feed mechanism, and poked in there with a screwdriver, and saying a prayer to the Emperor, he pulled the trigger. There was another cough, like a groundcar trying to start, then a satisfying purr as the barrels began to rotate, and-

Roughly 75 stubs flew out the enormous artillery cannon in half a second, practically melting the servitors, and otherwise shearing through them. The lasers told him where to point even as they exploded the servitors, and random lasbolts flew out ever barrel of the gun in random directions, exploding the servitors. There were a couple oddballs, like a shotgun round or two, but it was effective nonetheless, cutting the servitor army in half in less than a minute. Then an idea occurred to him.

"FOR THE IMPERIUM!" Grimnebulin yelled, grabbing hold of the grip he'd placed on the cannon, and-to everyone's shock, not least his own, he picked the whole gun up and charged the servitors. "FOOOOOORRRRRRRWAAAAARRRRRRD!" both he and Nikolaievitch yelled, simultaneously trying to out-ham the other. They looked, shrugged, and went back to firing, the Ursysovan and Firestormers bolts of electricity, plasma, lasers, and .77 caliber rocket-propelled grenades utterly destroying their foes.

...

"So we began!" yelled Colonel-Commissar Haru Nikolaievitch, the commissar of the Ursysovan Hivecrushers, the regiment formed by merging the Ursysovans and Firestormers, after the obligatory chant of the regiment's maxim. "Though we are deployed to the very edges of the galaxy, we shall not forget our roots. You shall all be armed with modified industrial tools of this world, and the finest our forge world has to offer when you are promoted. Maybe someday you shall wield these coilbolters, or a custom job by one of the artisans in the spires!" he let the wind blow back his greatcoat, giving a full view of his enormous pistols. "An Ursysovan's weapon is not just a tool, it is an extension of the Ursysovan! Whether guillotine cannon, arc-gun, Ravager shotgun, repulsor shotgun, heavy driller, chemthrower, flamer, our custom stub weapons, or even the venerable lascarbine, you do not lose it! Other regiments may laugh at our weaponry, and we shall not take it! We shall give the enemy the Emperor's lightning and fire, and see how they like it!"

The recruits cheered.

"The story of our formation," Nikolaievitch bellowed, "Is an odd one, to say the least. For we began on the Death World of Catachan, an underfunded unconventional warfare unit..."

'Back before I was a hammy badass' was the unspoken addition to that line.

...

Haru Nikolaievitch was little more than window dressing-he knew it and the regiment knew it. However, he was the proud owner of a 28-gauge bolter revolver, shotgun he was trying to persuade the AdMech to manufacture, both of which he had made himself from the refuse of his ruined Hive World. He dressed in dirty green pants that wouldn't be out of place in his current regiment with carapace armor underneath, an assortment of several straps over ancient and out-of-date flak armor, and a rosarius taken from Emperor knew where. He also had a skull painted in white over his face, and a Commissar cap placed at a jaunty angle over grey-white dreadlocks. (2) Overall, probably because of the ruined appearance of his clothes such as the roadtrain tires he placed over his shoulders and the skull, he managed a fierce tribal appearance.

Perhaps it was why he survived in a Catachan unit so long.

"We're here to investigate odd disappearances on a Forge World?" Sergeant Huston asked. "Why would the brass send us to-"

"Hell if I know," Haru said. "But I'm worried. On a Hive World, there's more than hundreds of disappearances a day. So what could've-"

"Some bigwig disappeared, I'll bet," Huston replied.

"Yeah, that's probably it. Grimnebulin! How much till we make landfall on Ursysova?"

"Half an hour," the fat tech-priest answered. "Think we can buy some spare guns there?"

"Be surprised if we can't," Haru said. "When it comes to wanton destruction, no-one does it quite like hivers. I'm looking forward to getting a good sniper rifle."

Huston stared at him.

"What? I'm a Commissar! I'm supposed to increase morale, and there's better ways to do it than murdering people for what I would've done anyway!"

...

1). I'm not actually sure what the designation for a minigun is in the Imperial Guard. But the way this one works is that it shoots lasers through the barrels, at the same time propelling bullets. How the hell it manages not to destroy all the barrels... I don't don't really know. But it's awesome, and think of it as a minigun that fires charged Peacemaker Carbine shots in Bulletstorm.

2) Based off my Brink character. Which is rather silly, but it looks cool.


End file.
